Momofuku Ko dish ranking

Instead of writing a classic review of our meal at Momofuku Ko, I've decided to rank the dishes instead. Note that it's really an 8-10 course tasting menu, but at points they serve different dishes to each member of a couple or group, so you end up with rather more, if you assiduously taste each other's food. NB: This meal was accompanied by the $50 drinks tasting menu, which included a number of wonderful wines (sparkling and otherwise) , sake, beer, and sweet sherry.

To comment globally before embarking on the parade below, Ko is a valuable, interactive experience. Valuable because one sees a modern commercial kitchen at work. Much of the food is pre-prepared, and needs only warming, or dressing. What is cooked is cooked in ways that you wouldn't necessarily even care to duplicate at home (or do you enjoy pouring butter over and over on your pan seared halibut as it cooks, or deep frying enormous tubes of stuffed chicken?) Interactive because the cooks jabber, and shimmy, and twirl right in front of you, like a high class sushi bar and hibachi rolled into one.

The food? Ah. I am tempted to gush. It was good. Very good. But at some point, there must be some line where the chef says, "no more". No more fat. No more grease. I must relent before I cross the line into vulgarity. Chang mocks that line. He laughs at it while blithely crossing it. Vulgarity of this sort is apparently his badge of honor. The result is the menu below, packed full of pork fat, and other fat, at literally every turn. I reeked of pork and fat this morning, I dreamt of pork and fat last night, I woke up sweating porky and fatty bullets of sweat. As trendy it is these days to revel in bacon and smoke, this is not my ideal situation. Don't get me wrong. I have a wrought iron stomach. But I was not comfortable going home last night, and I wonder very much if everyone else is able to shake off this bachannalian excess unscathed. I do not think even the most dedicated of French carnivore chefs would inflict such a tasting menu on his audience. I leave open the possibility that I am overreacting.

1. Long Island Fluke "sashimi" with buttermilk, yuzu, and poppy seeds - I would never have thought in a million years that buttermilk on raw fish would taste even acceptably well, but this tart creation was revelatory. So simple, and so good, and yet disappointing, in a way, because it shows that Chang can cook something other than pork fat sauteed in pork fat.

2. Pork Belly and Oyster in Kimchee Consommé with Napa cabbage - I've never had such powerful flavor from a broth, though I could discern no kimchee whatever. Paired with the fatty, unctuous, pork belly, it tasted like tonkutsu gone on steroids. And the oyster was a briny treat amid all the pork. A magnificent, unexpected dish.

3. Pea Soup with crayfish and morels - Tremendous pea flavor, and crayfish deeply redolent of their home. And, wonder of wonders, a small packet of morels right in the center. They made the dish for me. As Frank Bruni (Ny Times, of course) says, "[t]here’s a Georgia pea soup with such resonant pea flavor that you wonder about the bastard pedigree of all prior peas in your life and almost fail to notice the morels and the delicate crawfish in the soup."

4. Deep fried sous vide short ribs - beef short ribs cooked in a vacumm until extraordinarily tender, and then deep fried. Bruni calls it a "miracle of tender crisp contrast", and I think that sums it up terribly well. It's served with a spring onion, two carrots, and pickled mustard seeds, which looks like a sort of yellow caviar, and is more interesting texturally than as a flavor.

5. Grilled trout with bacon puree - Terribly wonderful New York river trout, paired, astonishingly, with pureed bacon. Why? I don't know. But the combination works wonders for a fish that by definition needs a little help.

6. "Smoked" Egg with onion soubise and chips - an egg masterfully cooked to a set white and completely liquid yolk, dipped in liquid smoke, knifed open, and served with what amounts to an onion jam and tiny, cornflake-like potato chips. I've love this for brunch, perhaps with the fatty english muffin.

7. English muffin with whipped lard - I hesitate to rate this as a "dish", but I don't know what else to do. Like eating bready pig.

8. Fried apple tart with sour cream ice cream - delicious. As everyone else has said, a cool play on the McDonald's apple pie, except that the McDonald's apple pie is now baked, and this is fried, in god knows what unholy oil. I've ranked it this low only because, in the end, it's fried apple pie, wasabi dusting or not.

9. "Lasagna" with whipped ricotta, roasted ricotta salata, the flowers of broccoli rabe, burgundy snails, and mushrooms - two squares of pasta plucked delicately out of the boiling water with some kind of forceps, and then topped with the bewildering flurry of ingredients above. My verdict? More snails, less whipped ricotta, please. I loved the broccoli rabe flowers.

10. Sorbets - Mine, an "arnold palmer" sorbet (half iced tea, half lemonade). Hers, Canteloupe on a base of cashew butter. The canteloupe, given the season, was surprising but terrific.

11. Chicken stuffed with morels and ramps (?), cooked ( I think), and then deep fried until crisp - salty fried goodness, but not as good as the short ribs that were the alternative.

12. "Cereal milk" panna cotta, with avocado creme - I didn't get the avocado, I didn't get the cereal milk, I didn't get the cornflake granola accompaniment. Blurgh.

13. Frozen foie gras, white wine jelly, lychee, and pine nut brittle - a snowy blizzard of fat (i.e, foie gras grated through the small end of a box grater) on top of a Riesling jelly embedded with lychees and sticky chunks of pine nut brittle. Inventive? Yes. Tasty. Eh. There was already so much fat, so much unct, in this meal. What I wouldn't have given at this point for something lemony, to cut through the seemingly endless parade of bellies, fats, creams, and fries. Instead, we got a foie gras dish with a caramelized sugar accompaniment that works no better than the atrocious foie gras creme brulee at Jean Georges.

14. Custard with caviar, asparagus, argan oil and cashews - A sort of cold set custard topped with asparagus, poached cashews, hackleback caviar, and oil. To my mind, a waste of space. The custard wasn't delicious, and the cashews nondescript. Argan sounds great when described, but in the dish it fades away to nothing.